For it begins to tell one tale, and then, all of a sudden, launches into another. In this break, in this slit suspending the story on an unidentified expectation, can be found the point of departure for the whole of this book: the points of suspension on which the broken threads of childhood and the web of writing are caught.
Georges Perec, W, Or the memory of Childhood
W space (W = double vé/double vee) is constituted by sets of demands which hang in webs and threads from fixed but hidden points of suspension, which are themselves constituted by quite other, and unidentified, demands.
It is easy enough to recognise that the suspended threads of a story, as Perec describes them, are its manifest content. But what is the function of the points of suspension that he refers to? What is a 'point', and into what is it embedded? He connects it with 'unidentified expectations', and from this we can suppose that whatever is motivating a life, a story, a process it remains hidden from the narrative which it supports. It remains hidden but imposes its shape from the outside.
A narrative's point of suspension continues to support its content, like a hook for a painting, until the point itself is recognised as part of what is being told. In that moment, the hook comes out of the wall, and the story collapses.
Once again the snares of writing were set. Once again I was like a child playing hide-and-seek, who doesn't know what he fears or wants more: to stay hidden, or to be found.
Georges Perec, W
The story, above all, needs permission to tell itself. It is not prepared to be confronted with how it is suspended from an unnarrated set of 'unidentified expectations', that true stuff of itself, which cannot be confronted, which must not be included, which cannot be told as a part of the story without thereby destroying it.
The story told is a specific flight from the stories not told, and these function as its points of suspension. And the stories that are not told may only appear through the story that is told, acting as a sort of armature.
For years, I took comfort in such an absence of history: its objective crispness, its apparent obviousness, its innocence protected me; but what did they protect me from, if not precisely from my history, the story of my living, my real story, my own story, which presumably was neither crisp nor objective, nor apparently obvious, nor obviously innocent?
Georges Perec, W
In honesty, all that we may tell of what we are about is only ever a revision of the earlier story that we had been telling up to the moment where it became unsustainable; the moment we are caught out in our telling of it; the moment we had discovered for ourselves that it was no longer supportable. Nietzsche describes it perfectly, as a predicament: that necessary and vital component which we needed to put our hands on before beginning our undertaking, so as to give ourselves a chance of completing it satisfactorily, becomes available to us only after the undertaking has been completed. Its late arrival thus throws a melancholy shadow over everything that is already finished.
We revise the story we tell because we have become aware, during its telling, that the point of suspense, from which our story draws its tension, has just now become exposed. And that, if we are to remain honest in our telling, if we are to preserve that W space, which is opened up for and by our story, then we must attempt to revise the revision, or lose the story and its space forever.
The narrative of the undertaking called Occupy W begins with a telling of what is wrong with the world. This first telling is rapidly revised into the tale of what is wrong with the undertaking called Occupy W. As it directs itself towards the truth of itself, and of its world, Occupy W begins to develop its W space in the practice of its own literature.
W space expands ambivalently around the hidden demand for the project's self-eviction from its own story. The action in any story is always created through the tension of what is not said and what is, through the tensed material that is stretching between the hook and the hooked. W literature is ratcheted by an inexpressible desire for relief from its obligation to stay, to occupy the same ground, to inhabit tents in November. Occupy W may realise W space only in the fraught search for its exit.
From the convolutions emerging from within its pinned space W literature generates successive revised narratives, each conditioned by a series of revelations concerning the narrative's points of suspension, its hidden demands, its real motivations, its unidentified expectations. And it is these hidden components of the story that become its true and hidden objects. Ultimately, the struggle of Occupy W is to not end in W space.
My childhood belongs to those things which I know I don't know much about. It is behind me; yet it is the ground on which I grew, and it once belonged to me, however obstinately I assert that it no longer does [...]However, childhood is neither longing nor terror, neither a paradise lost nor the golden fleece, but maybe horizon, a point of departure, a set of co-ordinates from which the axes of my life may draw their meaning.
Georges Perec, W
And yet, as Perec has already stated, there is no fundamental return to the point of original departure. There is only this return, that is to be followed by the revised return, and then by the return after that. And every return to the W horizon is different, and every point of departure is also hooked by a different point of suspension. And so every story must twists differently on its own hook. And each telling reveals something taut and unexpected but never entirely satisfying. And this collapses into another return. And the making ready, gathering of materials, to tell it all again.
I have no alternative but to conjure up what for too many years I called the irrevocable: the things that were, the things that stopped, the things that were closed off – things that surely were and today are no longer, but things that also were so that I may still be.
Georges Perec, W
There is no conjuring. There is only this, and unsatisfactory, conjuring. Where we conjure up the stopped, closed off things, we know it is not the last performance for our chosen pieces. There will be more conjuring. But we cannot be sure that the subsequent efforts will improve on the first. And each recommencement of our project is only the reopening of W space, within which its story must, and will, be revised again. And there is a strong sense of depletion – a pressure to truncate the revision before it even approaches its end.
We find, at the end of every revision, that we were not, after all, able to conjure up the stopped, closed off things that we imagined, in the beginning, that we could. The end is not adequate to what we hoped for in the beginning; and recognition of this is enough to set us in motion again – perhaps impatiently so as to arrive more rapidly at the important part. Or, perhaps methodically, exhaustively – as if cataloguing were the best approach.
If we were to ask ourselves, and thereby attempt to include our point of suspension, that hook in our side, whether it might be better if there was no story at all. If we could imagine a situation where the stopped and closed off things were to remain stopped and closed off. Then, might we also imagine a moment in the future where the narrative of who we are and what we want, will no longer insist to us on its own importance as it insists to us now?
One day, there must appear before us, and we can abstractly imagine it, a threshold which Dylan Thomas has already designated the forgetting of the forgetting – a point of release. There must arrive its moment where our story disappears, its point of suspension having fallen out, and the webs and threads attached to it will loose their internal tension, never to be revised, never to be re-suspended, never to be re-examined.
But before the strain in our story is relaxed to the point of utter non-familiarity, there is the ongoing and seemingly eternal, project of its revision and its re-suspension on other frames. If our story shrinks from that which hooks it, if it must evade its truth so as to be told at all, then we are presented with the problem that is peculiar to it. It is the question of honestly continuing a narrative in the space of that which it depends upon but which it also cannot name.
Even acknowledging that there must be delays, and lags, and allowing for the slip into fictionality, a literature of honesty still seems at least permissable. If we are to open W space for narrative, and occupy it with perpetually revised retellings, then the narrative must also include its own revisions, and of what, just now, it has been suspended from.
If we are to follow Perec into W space which, as it is constituted, must multiply external constraints upon internal process, the process’s points of suspension, then the narrative must seek, even if that is beyond it, to articulate the hooks and pins which stretch it out and twist it.
Between the need for a story and the impossibility of its stopped and closed off objects, the narrator seeks to expand the number, and range, of the story's unidentified expectations which it might become snagged by.
The proliferation of narrative constraints, in the face of an inaccessible and faceless set of objects, is performed in the hope (every story is told in the hope that the end is present at the beginning) that its threads will catch on other, and further, and multiplying, points of suspension, and thereby invite subsequent revisions in other registers. The comfort and compensation derived by the storyteller lies in the knowledge that the object which cannot be told may be realised only by that process which is incapable of telling of it.
